Zoo York

In 1642, a wheelwright named Claes Rademaker, stooping over a chest of duffels cloth, which he had intended to barter for beaver pelts, was axed in the back of the neck. The murder occurred, the settler David de Vries wrote, “on the Wickquasgeck road over which the Indians passed daily.” This may be the first recorded mention of the Wickquasgeck, parts of which became Brede Weg, the north-south artery of New Amsterdam. Brede Weg was later Anglicized to Broadway, which, at various junctures and junctions—most famously, at Times Square—became many things to many people: casino, brothel, parade ground, planetarium, the Street of Broken Dreams, the Main Stem, the Great White Way. In the nineteen-eighties, Mayor Ed Koch, speaking of the proliferation of food venders in the area, called it “a souk.” During the Giuliani era, strip bars closed down and office towers shot up, and Times Square, the trope goes, turned into a theme park. This summer, the Bloomberg administration decided to close Broadway to all vehicles between Forty-seventh and Forty-second Streets, creating a fifty-six-thousand-square-foot pedestrian plaza, stocked with pinkening Brits and pooped grandmothers. As a result, David Letterman said recently, “the greatest street in the world” has become a “petting zoo.”

You can see, to an extent, what Letterman meant. The new plaza, in the past few months, has been a hot, smelly enclosure, filled with people sitting under patio umbrellas comparing their cell-phone screens, which is what humans do instead of picking ticks out of one another’s fur. The action, what there was of it, on a recent afternoon: dozers, lunchers, a Verizon repair guy reading the tabloids in the shade of his fibre-splicing truck—a makeshift cabana. A poster advertised a “Best of the Buskers” show, sponsored by the Times Square Alliance.

New Yorkers of a querulous mindset—that is to say, many New Yorkers—do not like the place. They consider it a simulacrum of itself. They see, in such known inducers of docility as urns of hosta and bright-colored plastic chaise longues (which, after much hostility, have been replaced with standard-issue metal chairs), a sort of state-sponsored tranquillization scheme. The transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, Steve Cuozzo wrote in the Post, has “forced down the public’s throat an unconscionable tampering with the chemistry of the city’s most iconic place.” In 2009, the argument has it, Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie” has become a still-life. Cleared of honking cabbies, Times Square is denatured—the Via Veneto senza Vespas—and maybe so are we.

The new Times Square, it is true, feels inert. But all the grousing about traffic and tourists isn’t completely fair. Judging from the amount of Tupperware on display, locals are using the plaza, too. It will never be an elegant spot, like Central Park, or a sexy one, like Washington Square—you don’t particularly want to figure out what book anybody else is reading in his or her metal chair. There are fewer lights to wait for on the way to work, though. Besides, Broadway has always been too nice, or not nice enough, for somebody. According to James Traub’s “The Devil’s Playground,” during Prohibition sophisticates lamented that the libertine playground of years past—tango pirates, booze forts, lobster palaces—had given way to an unrecognizably anodyne playpen for hayseeds and soda jerks. A decade later, the smut, starfish-like, had regenerated. Nobody liked that, either. In 1933, the newspaperman Stanley Walker wrote, “There are chow-meineries, peep shows for men only, flea circuses, lectures on what killed Rudolf Valentino, jitney ballrooms and a farrago of other attractions which would have sickened the heart of the Broadwayite of even ten years ago.”

There is solace for modern-day handwringers in the High Line, the abandoned elevated rail bed that the city reclaimed this summer, from Gansevoort to Thirty-fourth Streets, and which is emerging as an unlikely redoubt of vice. According to the Post, guests have been putting on amateur skin shows in the floor-to-ceiling windows of the new Standard Hotel, at Thirteenth Street, which straddles what is referred to as the Thigh Line. (The hotel is the Eyeful Tower.) Letterman’s Times Square analogy breaks down on the tactile level—who are the petters, and who are the pettees? Downtown, the petting is literal, exuberant, and heavy. Parkgoers, willingly or not, are voyeurs. The spontaneous rise of High Line lowlife seems to suggest a conservation theory of seediness: root it out in one place, and it will sprout up somewhere else. Whack a mole, and you may find, across town, the mole whacking itself.

The High Line, with its exposed tracks and sprays of wildflowers, might be considered a foil to Times Square. Lobbied for by designers and musicians, it is intended to convey instant insouciance. It is an indie park, an anti-campus, a pair of pre-ripped skinny jeans to Times Square’s creased 550s. The Times Square plaza dissipates into the sidewalk, but the High Line is a tight and narrow catwalk, a picture with a frame. Chelsea boys, JDaters, and pretty women, dressed in rompers, promenade in front of people-watchers, perched like fashion editors on wooden benches: urbs in rure.

The glee with which New Yorkers have greeted the High Line’s unauthorized entertainments (there is also a homegrown, lantern-festooned cabaret near Twentieth Street, on somebody’s fire escape), and the grumpiness with which they have met the sanctioned ones at Times Square, may say less about our need for titillation than about our urge to demonstrate, as laissez-faire wanes and universal health care and the third reign of Bloomberg loom, that we retain some degree of volition. The parks are our town-hall meetings. We disrupt them, with shows of contempt, or little displays of impishness, for the same reasons that protesters tote AR-15s instead of talking about PPOs: to wrest a bit of control. The thrill of sullying pristine environments—of planting a handprint in freshly laid concrete—is particularly acute in those precincts in which there aren’t many pristine environments left to sully. Mischief seeks its own level. It won’t be long before someone finds a way to take back the Wickquasgeck. ♦

Lauren Collins began working at The New Yorker in 2003 and became a staff writer in 2008.